The modern communications era has brought about a tremendous expansion of wireline and wireless networks. Computer networks, television networks, and telephony networks are experiencing an unprecedented technological expansion, fueled by consumer demand. Wireless and mobile networking technologies have addressed related consumer demands, while providing more flexibility and immediacy of information transfer.
Current and future networking technologies continue to facilitate ease of information transfer and convenience to users. In order to provide easier or faster information transfer and convenience, telecommunication industry service providers are developing improvements to existing networks. For example, the evolved universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) terrestrial radio access networks (UTRAN and E-UTRAN) and the GERAN (GSM/EDGE radio access network) system are currently being developed. The E-UTRAN, which is also known as Long Term Evolution (LTE) or 3.9G, is aimed at upgrading prior technologies by improving efficiency, lowering costs, improving services, making use of new spectrum opportunities, and providing better integration with other open standards. LTE, like many other communication networks, employs base stations that are connected to a network in order to wirelessly communicate with wireless communication devices that may be distributed throughout a coverage area of a given base station.
The base stations, which are typically referred to as eNBs (enhanced node Bs) in LTE, typically serve as wireless communication access points (APs) for a wireless communication device that may be referred to as, for example, a subscriber station (SS), a mobile station (MS), a mobile terminal (MT) or user equipment (UE). A recent focus in relation to wireless broadband access networks has been on improving performance with respect to mobile devices. However, given that network resources are limited or have associated costs, it is desirable to improve performance in balance with and consideration of the costs in terms of network resources.